History and prizes

The late Dorothy Collard, a former member of APQG, left a bequest from her estate to the Guild to sponsor an annual challenge for five years, with the possibility of extending this. After nine years, the Guild has taken over the sponsorship of this challenge.

Dorothy’s estate provided a mounted greenstone trophy with space for engraved plates for each winner’s name to be added, and a sum of $500 per annum to cover a first prize of $200 and three merit awards of $100 each. The first prize winner holds the Dorothy Collard Memorial Trophy for one year.

Current Challenge rules

• The 2012 Dorothy Collard Challenge Entry Form will be available for download shortly.

• Each quilt must interpret in some way the Challenge Theme (for 2012 the theme is 'Double')
• Each entry must be a three-layered piece of patchwork or quilting
• Size: No more than 1 metre in any direction.  Any shape within that size.
• It must be able to be hung on our Guild display stands.
• Any technique, any style
• Each one must be labelled on the back, and accompanied by an entry form. If you are not the sole maker of your entry, please indicate on the form. This is not to disqualify the entry in any way but to encourage the practice of acknowledgement
• Open to all members of the APQG
• Quilts must be handed in at the April Guild meeting

All care will be taken with entries while they are in the Guild's possession, but insurance is your responsibility.

Judging and Prizegiving

Winners will be announced at the opening of the exhibition at the Lake House, 37 Fred Thomas Drive, Takapuna, on Monday, April 9, 2012 The exhibition will run until April 27, 2012.

Click here for our Dorothy Collard gallery

A Memory of Dorothy Collard

by Pat Britton

I met Dorothy Collard sixteen years ago as the Highway 16 Quilting Group came into being… we both joined on the same night, very early on in it’s existence.

Dorothy adored fabric and her pleasure in buying was a joy to see… and she enjoyed each and every piece.
Her sewing room was well organised and despite the huge amount of fabric she had she knew just what she had, and what is more, where each piece was!

Dorothy also enjoyed books and magazines and had a big library to refer to. She would see a quilt that she particularly liked and would buy the yardage and backing for that design. She kept a note book just for making notes about these quilts… the book or magazine the design was in was noted, as were snippets of the fabric in relation to it’s use in the design. Then the whole was bundled together and marked accordingly. When I helped her move from Henderson to Tauranga she had 84 of these bundles… there had been more but some had been made up and I am the proud owner of two of these… one was a finished quilt, the other a top that I have completed.

Dorothy liked the simple, traditional designs and was meticulous in the making of each block… every triangle had perfect points and everything was pressed and checked for size before going on to the next step.
She always machine quilted, which surprised me as she did beautiful embroidery as well as her patchwork! I was always at a loss to know why she didn’t enjoy hand quilting. Her machine quilting was always simply done but exact in its execution. I can well remember her delight when she was first commissioned to make a quilt, and it was a beauty… more quickly followed.

It was a loss to the quilting fraternity when Dorothy succumbed to cancer in April 1999 and I lost a dear friend.